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This illustration was printed at Toppan Printing's Kawaguchi Plant using a gravure printing press on November 26, 2021, with Keiichi Tanaami present. This work is the very first gravure prints for the Revolver series by Keiichi Tanaami × Fujio Akatsuka.
(pre-sale on this site by lottery. They will also be sold in galleries and at other locations.)
Gravure printing uses ink with low viscosity and prints are made by pressing the paper directly against cylinder-shaped plates. The size of the printing press is approximately 60 meters long, 15-20 meters high and 2-3 meters wide. The main printing press alone is almost the size of a six-story building. Four colors (known as CMYK) are used for printing: cyan (light blue), magenta (dark pink), yellow and black. The cylinder-shaped plates used to print each color weigh between 1.5 and 2 tons. These chrome-plated plates can print up to one million copies. For this edition, the press was used to print just 111 copies.
Since the 1960s, Tanaami has been involved in various magazines commonly referred to as "gravure magazines." He was also the designer for Myojo and an art director for the Japanese edition of Playboy. However, this was the first time he has seen gravure platemaking and printing in action.
The plates, which are broken down into four CMYK colors, are engraved onto copper cylinders with diamond needles and then chrome-plated. Ink that looks like colored water is poured onto the surface of the cylinder and pressed against the white paper, flowing like a colorful river as it overlaps and creates an image.
Tanaami gazed intently as his work became a torrent of color.
Is it a person or an alien staring at us with big, shining eyes in this work? There are twisted red pines, wave patterns like woodblock prints, and rays of light shot into space. Fighter jets fly and flames burst into flames. Above it all, Nyarome strikes a pose as he flutters like a thin sheet of paper. The cat, created by Fujio Akatsuka, speaks human language and is always rebelling against someone or something.
As alluded to in the title 'Between Mirrors', when mirrors face each other an endless repetition of images arises. This work imparts a hyper-temporal and hyperspatial dizzying experience to the viewer.
Tanaami was born in Tokyo in 1936, graduated from Musashino Art University, and awarded a special prize by the Japan Advertising Artists Club in 1958. Having immersed in American counterculture and pop art since the 1960s, he was an independent artist who had been actively crossing boundaries to pursue his creative endeavors, which range from animation to silk screens, manga-like illustrations, collages, experimental films, paintings, three-dimensional works, and more, without restricting himself to any medium or genre. Inspired by his encounter with Andy Warhol, he had continued to experimentally challenge the major themes tackled by contemporary art today, such as art and design, art and products, everyday beauty, and the public and art, while using the design methodology of editing to the present day. Through more than half a century of creative activities, he has gained a high reputation worldwide as one of the pioneers of pop art, which symbolizes postwar Japan. Tanaami's recent major exhibitions include Keiichi Tanaami: Adventures in Memory (2024, The National Art Center Tokyo, Tokyo), TANAAMI!! AKATSUKA!! That’ s All Right!!(2023, PARCO MUSEUM TOKYO, Tokyo)the solo exhibitions Manhattan Universe (2022, Venus Over Manhattan, New York), A Mirror of the World (2022, Nanzuka, Tokyo), Tokyo Pop Underground (2019, Jeffrey Deitch, New York), and Keiichi Tanaami (2019, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland); as well as the group exhibitions Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), The World Goes Pop (2015, Tate Modern, London), International Pop (2015, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA), and many others. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Art Institute of Chicago, M+ (Hong Kong), National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), and Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art (Berlin).
グラビア プリント
It all happened after the Second World War. During Japan's period of rapid economic growth, countless images were printed using gravure printing. People were fascinated by the vivid colors. The term "gravure idol" is derived from gravure printing.
Times have changed. Gravure printing presses were huge and unsuitable for small print runs. At the end of 2021, Shueisha's gravure printing era came to a close.
Printing methods such as lithography, while abandoned as a commercial printing method, found their way into fine art printing, and have survived. However, given the scale and structure of gravure printing, it is extremely difficult to get it up and running again once it has stopped.
Since this was the final opportunity, Shueisha Manga Art Heritage decided to produce art prints using gravure printing presses. The purpose of this project is to pass on the gravure prints and the record of their production to future generations.
We then reached out to Keiichi Tanaami about this project.
Tanaami was born in 1936. After experiencing the Second World War as a child, Tanaami became active as a designer and illustrator after the war and was also the first art director of the Japanese edition of PLAYBOY (1975-2008, Shueisha).
"I'd love to do it," Tanaami responded.
At our first meeting, he said, “How about a collaboration with Akatsuka-san?” Within two months of the initial request, Tanaami had produced more than 20 works. At the end of 2021, six of these works were selected for gravure printing.
The length of the printing machine is about 60 meters. The height is around 15 to 20 meters. This is equivalent to around three train cars on the Yamanote Line, assuming each car is approximately 20 meters in length. The height is equivalent to a five or six-story building. The machine is much larger than a typical house. Within the machine, paper measuring 120 to 130 meters is fed through as it moves vertically.
Cylindrical plates with copper plating are used for printing. They are 1,900 mm long, with a diameter of roughly 800 to 880 mm, and a weight of 1.5 to 2.0 tons. To perform color printing, four plates are required: C (cyan = light blue), M (magenta = pink), Y (yellow), and K (key plate = black). At the method’s peak, more than 600 printing plates were in operation at the Kawaguchi plant of Toppan Printing (now TOPPAN Colorer Inc.) alone.
In the past, film was used to create plates through chemical etching, but from the 1990s onward, it became standard to cut plates directly from data using diamond needles. The same technique was used for these works.
Typically, four to six diamond needles are placed per plate, and they simultaneously carve images on the plate while the cylinders are rotated. In magazine printing, where multiple pages are laid out on a single sheet of paper, this does not cause any problems. However, in this case, since we needed to print single large-format works on one sheet, thin lines were found to appear at the seams. For this reason, we only used one diamond needle, and an engraving process that would take around one and a half hours when printing magazines took about five hours for the work to be completed. This is an unprecedented work of plate-making. Once the image is engraved onto the plate, it is given a chrome coating, increasing its hardness from roughly 200 to around 1,000. These plates last long enough to print a million copies.
For printing, liquid ink designed for gravure printing is used. A lightweight cup called the Zahn Cup is used to check the concentration. A hole 3 mm in diameter is drilled in the bottom. It measures how many seconds it takes for each color of liquid to drain completely, and this is used as the basis for adjusting the concentration. The draining times are 11.13 seconds for Y (yellow), 11.31 seconds for M (magenta = pink), 11.44 seconds for C (cyan = light blue), and 11.56 seconds for K (key plate = black). To adjust the color, the staff in charge of each color uses a stopwatch to adjust the time. This job requires skill.
An alarm sounds in the factory, and printing begins.
The printing speed is typically about 600 revolutions per hour. The paper flows at a speed equivalent to an Olympic athlete running the 100-meter dash. In offset printing, colors are printed in order from dark to light (K (black) → C (cyan) → M (magenta) → Y (yellow)), while in gravure printing, colors are printed in order from light to dark (Y→M→C→K). (Note: The order varies depending on the printing company.)
For these art prints created on a gravure printing press, we attempted something for the first time since the postwar era, apart from engraving with a single diamond needle.
The gravure printing press is so large, and the plate production so time-consuming, that test printing could not be carried out on the actual machine. An offset printing machine was used for the proofs, and gravure printing was carried out in accordance with the offset printing colors approved by the client. Although gravure printing is actually capable of richer color expression than offset printing, its capabilities have been intentionally limited for many decades.
These limitations were removed in the final days of published gravure.
Plate making and printing are carried out in the Adobe RGB color range, which exceeds the range of offset printing. This makes it possible to print in vibrant and deep colors.
In November 2021, Keiichi Tanaami observed the gravure printing process in action and, upon viewing the proof prints, called the results astonishing.
